Page Loading Effects

If you have visited the brilliantly designed websites of Nicolas Zezuka and Active Theory you might have noticed the slick loading animations that happen before new content is displayed. This kind of loading style is quite trendy lately and we wanted to give you some inspiration. The idea is to animate a shape into the viewport and show an activity indicator. When the new content is loaded, the shape will animate back to reveal the page. We’ll use animated SVGs with Snap.svg for the effects because this allows us to create complex shapes and interesting morphing transitions.

Please also note that the examples only serve for your inspiration. We haven’t implemented any fallbacks and we “fake” the dynamic loading of new content. Also note that we are animating SVGs and pseudo-elements which might not work well in some browsers.

The way we show the loading overlay is by defining an animation on a path that we define in the following SVG:

We define an initial path that is not visible in the viewport inside of the SVG and a opening and closing path in data attributes on the pageload-overlay division. As you can see, we are using a small viewBox but we stretch the drawing to 100% of the window width and height while not preserving the aspect ratio. If we don’t have a closing path defined, we’ll animate back to the intial path.

Note that we can also add more than one path (separated by a semicolon) which allows for a step wise animation of the SVG drawing like you can see in the first demo.

We set the overlay division to a fixed position, covering all the page, and use a CSS-only loading indicator by styling the ::before and ::after pseudo elements of the division.

We use visibility here because using those fixed positioning styles with pointer-events none on the SVG itself causes some trouble on mobile, so we position and manipulate the parent div instead.

You might have noticed that the circle animations is also done by animating from one path to another (there are of course other ways of doing this, scaling for example) but we used the following values to make sure the circle is “responsive” but does not stretch like the other shapes:

ML is a freelance web designer and developer with a passion for interaction design. She studied Cognitive Science and Computational Logic and has a weakness for the smell of freshly ground peppercorns.